Prospero Mérimée's novella "The Bear", the life and work of Bertrand Cantat and Vito Luckaus
Translated from Polish by Rimvydas Strielkūnas
Łukasz Twarkowski, a colleague of the famous Polish theatre director Krystian Lupa, who was awarded the Golden Stage Cross in 2015 for the video projections he created for the play Heroes' Square, is directing a play inspired by the French writer Prospero Mérimée's (1803-1870) novella about 19th-century Samogitian Samogitia, The Bear.
Director Łukasz Twarkowski: "The dramaturgy of the play is based on three sources. The first is Prospero Mérimée's literary mystification The Bear. The other two are the complex and controversial biographies of radical artists: the Lithuanian photographer Vitas Lucas and the vocalist of the French rock band Noir Désir, Bertrand Cantat. Luckus and Cantat share with Count Shemet, the protagonist of The Bear, not only a particular tendency to combine death and affect, not only an interest in the human animal element or violence. Each of them is set in Vilnius, the core of all these stories remains largely inaccessible to us, and the subject matter of each of them is open to speculation. They are marginal events, beyond the reach of logic and rational tools of knowledge."
Literary scholar Kęstutis Nastopka on Prospero Mérimée's The Bear: "Having conceived The Bear as an antiphrase to the terrible stories that were read in the salon of Empress Eugenie, Napoleon III's wife, and having chosen Samogitia as an exotic corner of Europe, known only by hearsay, the French romantic and mystificator Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) took a serious interest in the "local colour" of this region - its language, its ethnography and its past. To one of his correspondents, the novelist wrote: "The trouble is that I soon found the story quite attractive and, instead of drawing a caricature, I wanted to draw a portrait of the impossible." The sources from which the author drew his knowledge about Samogitia and Lithuania were not numerous: the book "The Enslaved Poland" by the Polish emigrant Edmond Choiecki, who signed under the pseudonym of Charles Edmond, Adam Mickiewicz's poem "Ponas Tadas" and the ballad "Three Vigilantes", the stories he had heard from the Lithuanians who had emigrated to France after the 1863 uprising, and the letters he had received from Russia, which discussed the political affairs in Lithuania. From this fragmentary and often contradictory information, the writer's creative imagination created, in his words, a rather poetic mixture of "humanity and savagery", which is interpreted in the culture of the Samogitians by a foreign observer - Professor Wittenbach. In an attempt to solve the Count's riddle, he describes the young Shemeta as a dual being, human and beast at the same time."
